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Epic aims to connect stores and recognize universal ownership

Epic Games' Tim Sweeney speaks about Epic's goal of connecting game hubs for user availability.

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On Tuesday, Epic Games and CD Projekt's GOG announced an agreement to integrate Epic Games Store and Epic Games user accounts in GOG Galaxy 2.0, a central point to collect and launch any single PC game you own instead of opening proprietary apps like Steam, Origin, Uplay or EGS.

After that, Epic's founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, went even further to support the universal ownership of digital items and ask for the integration of as many platforms as possible and stores for the good of the players.

"Ultimately, ownership of digital items should be a universal notion, independent of stores and platforms. So much of the digital world today is frustrated by powerful intermediaries whose toll booths obstruct open commerce to keep customers and their purchases locked in.

Epic's committed to working with all willing ecosystems to connect our stores and recognize universal ownership. Early bits include purchase integration with Humble and others and library visibility to GOG. A lot more will be coming over time."

But how will so many different companies with different technologies in the background of the stores, databases and users profiling merge? Should all of them leave their own identity and past behind? Sweeney has three different models in mind. A federation would be easier but would meet the limits sooner, as he said on Twitter:

"Possible implementation strategies: federated (each store maintains its own ownership records, but can communicate with other stores and recognize theirs too); clearinghouse (stores agree on a common ownership database); decentralized (a blockchain type leger tracks ownership).

There's no question this thing will start with federated ownership because it's easy to adopt incrementally without disrupting existing stores. But that's doesn't scale well, so it's probably not the ultimate solution."

Do you think that the global integration of personal gaming accounts would be better for you as a player and as a consumer?

Epic aims to connect stores and recognize universal ownership


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